The Battle at Cultural Pass

I WAS channel surfing yesterday afternoon when I came across The Battle at Apache Pass on TCM. Like many old school Westerns, this 1952 flick pits the cavalry (the good guys) against the Indians (the bad guys). Guess who won? Needless to say, assembly-line films like these helped put the “B” in B movies, indelibly. Also needless to say, the Indian leads – Jeff Chandler as “Cochise” and Susan Cabot as his enchantress “Nono” – were played by actors as white as the driven snow. (Mercifully, Geronimo was played by Jay Silverheels, a Canadian of Mohawk descent.) All of the white guys were played by white guys. Today, of course, we laugh at this and dismiss the appalling insensitivity to "those times." Asking, “What were they thinking?” draws only one reply: they weren’t. It was so 1950s – and, alas, so America for most of her history. The older generation that grew up ingesting this fare and the “us versus them” values it engendered are passing from the scene. Beyond them, the audience today for films like “Apache Pass” is mostly confined to a trifling number of B movie fans. Still, one wonders about the unconscious role these movies may have had in shaping views about Muslims and illegal immigrants today. After all, in some angry quarters of our society, it’s still very much “us versus them.”